São Paulo biennial: radical art and the struggle for survival

Conceived during the mass protests in Brazil last year, the premier art event in Latin America puts everything from the Amazon’s ethnic cleansing to the demonisation of mixed-race youth on the walls of Oscar Niemeyer’s famous pavilion

Silence. Darkness. Then the eyes adjust and a figure becomes apparent, his face faintly illuminated by a dark blue light. It’s a man with indigenous features who starts to speak in a quiet matter-of-fact voice that belies the despair in his words: “Our people have always been invisible to the world … They say we live in a country of democratic rights, but for indigenous people the state doesn’t exist.”

The Indian man pauses for what feels like an eternity as he wrestles with how to describe the loss experienced by his people, the Guarani, the largest surviving indigenous group in Brazil. Only 51,000 of them are left, but having been robbed of much of their land, they have one of the highest suicide rates in the world, as well as high levels of crime and alcoholism. Unscripted, unrehearsed and largely unedited, the monologue continues for several minutes with only one shift, when the camera pans back to reveal the Indian, called Almires Martins, dipping his hands in thick black warpaint. But it is not for battle. Instead, he smears his face repeatedly until he becomes one with the darkness.

Perhaps because of this context, Ymà Nhadehetema is among the most poignant of the roughly 100 works on display, though its mood of quiet despair is, at first, a striking contrast to the energy of an unswervingly polemical exhibition.

Ymá Nhandehetama’s In the Past We Were Many. Photograph: Armando Queiroz and Marcelo Rodrigues

The São Paulo bienal, at Oscar Niemeyer’s modernist Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, has long been the premier art event in Latin America. But the current edition is not the usual showcase of major names in the art market. Instead, it is more of a soapbox from which predominantly young artists have been commissioned to shout out about injustice, inequality, prejudice, ignorance and the possibility of change. The exhibition, which runs until 7 December, was conceived during the mass protests that swept Brazil in June 2013, and is deliberately of its time – confrontational and engaged. That is evident from the fill-in-the-missing-verb title “How to … things that don’t exist” that is the mission statement of the curators: “We wanted to look into ways of generating conflict, through projects that have at their core an unresolved relationship between groups, between different versions of history or between incompatible ideas.”

It prods at several of the world’s most active political and social fault lines, from conflict in the Middle East to forced displacement in the Balkans, attacks on democracy in Russia and gender issues.

The Bolivian anarchist-feminist collective, Mujeres Creando were due to parade a giant model uterus followed by a debate by 100 women who have had abortions. Another work – Dios Es Marica (God is Queer) – brings together four artists organised by Peruvian Miguel López to parody the sexual conventions found in religion, politics and art.

The urge for action is also explicit in Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas’s series, The Incidental Insurgents, which is a set of four overlapping stories – brought to life through historical artifacts and extracts from newspapers, novels and political screeds – of Parisian anarchists in 1910, anti-British rebels in 1930s Palestine, a fictional bandit in 1970s Mexico and the artists themselves in contemporary Palestine. “There’s a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter,” reads one exhibit.

Given these dynamics, it was almost inevitable that the biennial itself faced a rebellion shortly before the opening, when a group of participating artists briefly called for a boycott of the event unless it returned funding by the Israeli embassy. The dispute was resolved by a taped amendment to the sponsorship board that spelled out that the consulates involved (including that of the UK) were simply supporting artists from their own countries.

It was a fudged compromise, perhaps not quite in keeping with the confrontational billing of the event. Sponsored by Itau - one of Brazil’s biggest banks – backed by a São Paulo city government and curated by an all-white collective, there would always be questions about how radical such a show could be.

But looking at the range of artists, their works and the way the show has been shaped, the answer is “very”.

The vast majority of the projects were commissioned specifically for this biennial by a seven-member curating team, predominantly made up of outsiders who were influenced by the million-person demonstrations in Brazil last year. “We are the first gringos to curate this exhibition” said Charles Esche, a member of the collective. The documentary Não é Sobre Sapatos (It’s Not About Shoes) uses video images of shoes that were recorded by police so they could identify protesters even after they changed their tops and put on “anonymous” masks. Another project, Onibus Tarifa Zero by Graziela Kunsch, envisages a free bus – the initial demand of protesters in last year’s rallies – that would circulate through the city with no known destination.

One of the aims of the biennial, Esche said, was to bring together communities that are invisible to one another. This invisibility was evident in the press preview and gala opening, when almost the only non-white faces were those of security guards and waiters (though more than half of Brazil’s population are mixed race or black). “Inequality in Brazil is gross,” the curator told me. “We need to use the elite biennial to give a platform for those communities.”

They are certainly visible in the giant murals of mixed-race youths that stare out across the second floor of the biennial. These huge portraits are the work of Amazonian street artist Éder Oliveira, who finds his subjects in the crime pages of newspapers: “They are usually seen in photographs, where they are handcuffed and being led away by police,” says Oliveira, who, like his portraits, is a “coboclo” a mix of white, black and indian. “The media images were very sensationalist. Everything about them said, ‘This type of person is dangerous.’ It’s a form of racism.”

He describes his work as a form of auto-affirmation. In his portraits, the characters in the crime photos are stripped of tattoos, weapons and handcuffs, and painted large on walls that would normally be the location for posters of politicians or celebrities in his home city of Belém in the Amazon. “I wanted people to confront the portraits so they could see them just as people, not as criminals with knives or wanted signs,” he adds. For him, it is part of an effort to make people look at the Amazon in a different light. “The Amazon is the centre of the world when it comes to forestry or resources, but nobody really thinks about the inhabitants. I want to show the people. That’s why it is important to bring the work here to São Paulo. The art of Brazil is very elite.”

Although it is located thousands of kilometres away, the Amazon looms large in this exhibition. It is both a counterpoint to the urban setting of São Paulo, South America’s biggest city, and an embodiment of cultural and ecological alternatives that are at risk of becoming “things that don’t exist”. The curators and artists alike assert that their presentation of the Amazon is no romantic or mythologised heart of darkness on which outsiders can impose their fears and fantasies. Instead, it is presented as just another home, another frontline of dispute.

Sheela Gowda’s work with rubber tappers touches on the forest’s place in the global economy. John Downey’s videos, maps and drawings of his months spent with the Yanomami tribe in the 1970s highlight the involved human – rather than detached ethnographer – side of engagement, while Egyptian artists Anna Boghiguian’s recent trip to the region is one of the inspirations for her Cities by the River installation of honeycombs, drawings and documents that investigate the inequality along the Amazon, Nile and Ganges.

In this thought-provoking show, struggle is never far away. It can be violent, especially in the Amazon, a message driven home with brutal directness by a piece, titled Martírio (Martyrs): a rough, gory sculpture of Indian heads – with faces ripped, bleeding and coiled in barbed wire – that dangle from pedestals topped by chainsaws and rifles. Behind them are two giant oil paintings that echo the grisly baroque images of Christ and the martyrs found in many Latin American churches. But instead of the ancients, the portraits are of 30 individuals – Indians, activists, lawyers and priests – who were killed in the struggle against deforestation by ranchers and loggers.

Among them is Chico Mendes, the leader of the rubber tappers union, and Quintino Lira, who was known as the Robin Hood of Pará state. The work is journalistic in its immediacy. The most recent victim was Maria Lucia Nascimento, a member of the Landless Workers’ Movement, who was allegedly killed by farmers in Mato Grosso two weeks before the start of the biennial. “I added her picture at the last moment because her case is so symbolic,” says the artist, Thiago Martins de Melo, who is based in the far northern city of São Luis. “I just want to tell people about the ethnic cleansing that is taking place in Brazil in the process of land clearance.”

In style, his garishly symbolic work could hardly be more of a contrast with the quiet gloom of the video testimony about the Guarani. But as this biennial reminds the visitor, struggle comes in many forms – violent and peaceful, prominent and invisible, inspired and hopeless. There is both a place of combat here for those fighting noisily for change who feel history is on their side, and a reflective space for those – like Brazil’s indigenous groups – who have been ignored, silenced and defeated for centuries.